You're talking about fig-leaf, rear-covering technicalities for specialists that are buried in the small print. I'm talking about the free market culture which economists have at least indirectly nurtured for a couple centuries.
Why, when Gordon Gekko said in "Wall Street" that greed is good, did the audience swoon and admire him? Oliver Stone said the movie was supposed to be a satire and a repudiation of the Wall Street mentality, but the audience saw it differently because the movie's implicit glorification of the exclusive wealth that can be taken in the capitalist struggle rubbed off on them.
It's the same with economics. The idealizations in the positing of ceteris paribus laws or counterfactual nomic relations in society are easily construed as teleological, as Aristotelian "tendencies." The more we "free" our markets to work like the economists say they inherently work (in a vacuum or a perfect world), the more "efficient" and "optimal" they'll be. What else could "perfect competition" mean? "Perfect" is normative, so the discourse is at least implicitly teleological.
Your criticism of me at the end there is laughable. I'm not a socialist. Like most informed people, I recognize the validity of some of Marx's philosophical criticisms of capitalism, but I make no predictions about which economic system is best since I don't know enough about economics to judge. More importantly, I'm not so interested in that level of analysis. I prefer to talk about the even bigger picture.
Comparing the power of the economics establishment in the revolving-door corridors of Washington with that of a lowly Medium writer is pathetically weak. All I'm doing is casting some doubt on the so-called scientific neutrality of Western economists. There's scientism afoot here, and I'm kicking over the beast to have a look at its underbelly.
No false dichotomies are entailed by my criticisms. I don't even repudiate capitalism. I say that it has advantages and disadvantages. We should look at the problems clearly, without theological commitments or kneejerk deference to potentially corrupted, superficially scientific experts.
